The present invention is related to systems for raising and collecting funds (e.g. contributions for fund raising programs, magazine sales, book clubs, record clubs, etc.). Traditionally, funds are collected by soliciting (i.e. through mail, telephone, or personal contact) probable or possible contributors or customers in an effort to obtain a one-time donation or single sale. Future donations or sales usually require additional solicitations. Lists of possible contributors or customers are generated from a variety of sources. Such sources include organization membership directories, personal references, contributor lists from related or prior fund raising events, customer sales lists from other magazines or book clubs, etc. These traditional fund raising methods have certain disadvantages. Contributors or existing customers must be recontacted each time a new contribution or future sale is requested. This is time-consuming, costly, and possibly counter-productive if contributors or customers feel bothered by repeat solicitations. Duplicate solicitation, which often offends contributors and customers, is common in traditional fund raising and sales programs because of duplications in contributor and customer lists. Prior art programs for eliminating duplications have been inadequate.
In today's fund raising and sales programs, contributor and customer lists are stored in a computer system on some form of magnetic media, e.g. hard disk, floppy disk or tape. Management of contributor/customer lists is usually performed by a computer program that merges one source of data (e.g. names/addresses of contributors) with another source and then purges duplicate records. Each "record" will normally include both the name and address of one person. Such systems are designed to eliminate a duplicate record only when all data elements of the duplicate match exactly with the data elements of another record.
Key elements of the record are combined to form a matchcode, which is then attached to the original record and carried throughout the merge/purge process. For example, different match codes may include the first 4 characters of the last name, the address number, the first 3 characters of the street name, and the last 2 digits of the zip code. In prior art merge/purge systems a duplicate record is identified only if all elements of each matchcode match exactly. In practice however, these prior art methods fail to detect many duplicate records where a person's name or street name has been misspelled, or a street number or zip code number has been transposed.